January 2016 | poetry
Broken Main
Someone from Taft Hall calls it in:
flooded grass, stranded cars.
More trouble with the water main.
Every week, the old iron pipe
rusts through somewhere and bursts,
swamping campus lawns and parking lots.
Same old, same old, says the boss
when we reach the scene, three of us
squeezed onto the truck’s bench seat,
staring at the task ahead.
Water bubbles from a spring hole
and spills down the sidewalk.
Lot A has turned into a small lake.
Years ago it was all play time,
splashing around in pools like this.
With the blackbirds I looked for worms;
then an afternoon at the creek
waiting for fish to bite.
Now sloshing is part of the job.
Turn off the main, drive down to the shop,
wait for the water to recede a bit.
Lunch and Paul Harvey on the radio
until the boss says, Max and Stephens
get on up there, dig us a hole.
With each shovelful, water sucks back in.
Boots soak through, feet prune up.
An hour later, our little triad stares down
at exposed pipe, a six-inch split.
Max kneels in the muck to work the hacksaw.
The boss heads back to the shop to fetch some parts.
People watch our work from office windows,
sipping coffee, looking cool in air conditioning.
One suit grins and gives the thumbs-up.
We’re still at it when the secretaries
leave for the day. The boss doffs his hat
and says Ma’am as they pass.
We watch them mince down the sidewalk,
gingerly picking a path around puddles.
The prettiest one slips off her shoes
and tiptoes barefoot to an islanded Mustang—
a real beauty, one slick ride.
Come on now, the boss says,
no looking at the ladies.
We got work to do.
Another four hours and
the busted pipe’s replaced,
the hole refilled, the lawn spruced up.
The summer sun has already set.
Turning on the main again, we know
the next weak spot down the line
will start to feel the pressure,
ready to burst. Give it a week
and we’ll find out where.
Visiting the Asylum
Noises outside: the beating of wings,
a persistent caw, caw, caw.
From the window I see
the evening sun—bloody
through the branches of a dead tree,
a crow perched near the top,
a groundskeeper crossing the leaf-filled lawn.
What did I expect to learn,
making this pilgrimage
just to visit his former room?
There’s passing chatter in the corridor,
the clacking wheels of a cart.
Somewhere a phone rings and rings,
a door clicks shut, footsteps fade.
Did he, too, hear the bird’s mockery?
Did it foretell renewed anxieties,
the advent of the crisis moment?
Did he stumble to this pane,
peering through the mist
of breath on glass, wondering
who called his name?
I imagine the anguish
when desperate for an answer
from God he gazed
upon this hysterical crow
and the black-garbed groundskeeper
now steadfastly lowering the flag.
by Stephen Cloud
After kicking around the West for a while (with stops in Spokane, Flagstaff, and Sedona), Stephen Cloud has settled in Albuquerque, where he’s fixing up an old adobe, working on poems, and pondering the official New Mexico state question: “Red or green?” Recent publications include work in Valparaiso Poetry Review, High Desert Journal, New Madrid, Shenandoah, and Tar River Poetry.
January 2016 | poetry
It’s curious about the massed communicants,
not the few tied and suited boys, especially,
but the virginally, wedding-gowned girls
in lace and taffeta, prim alabaster angels
now pledged, going steady with the Church.
Are they truly knowledgeable at their age
to know right from wrong and to distinguish
heaven’s wine and manna from fruits of evil?
Mass ends and the newly sated pass
slowly, processing down the aisle;
at least one pre-nun, guided between
beaming parents, head tilted back, eyes
tight shut, hands still clasped in devotion,
is graced by the faith of incomprehension.
by Richard Hartwell
Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school (remember the hormonally-challenged?) English teacher living in Moreno Valley, California. He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing, Rick would rather be still tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon.
January 2016 | poetry
Bones of the trees
are showing now,
the terrible light.
Darkness is all
the cold holds, which
shivers out of sight.
The wind carries
on with sadness,
yet leaves no promise.
We hope for more
at summer’s end.
All we have is this.
by Tom Montag
Tom Montag is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013. He is a contributing writer at Verse-Virtual and in 2015 was the featured poet at Atticus Review (April) and Contemporary American Voices (August). Other poems are found at Hamilton Stone Review, The Homestead Review, Little Patuxent Review, Mud Season Review, Poetry Quarterly, Provo Canyon Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere.
January 2016 | poetry
Becoming Aware of the Tide
Just today I feel older
Driving to the vet
Driving 17 miles for a hat I left behind
at a monthly meeting
Listening to a folk-rock album
awash in distracted serenity
Ebbing as soon
as it draws attention
Coleridge Stares at the Sea in Search of Star Ratings
We accept sponges
as they line up along our shores
Hate the sand-
glasses up, lying for the sun
Hate the strain-
bags happy to gulp burn
Melt over mogul diamonds buried
deep enough to require faith
by Mark Danowsky
Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Alba, Cordite, Grey Sparrow, Mobius, Shot Glass Journal, Third Wednesday and other journals. Mark is originally from the Philadelphia area, but currently resides in North-Central West Virginia. He works for a private detective agency and is Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.
January 2016 | poetry
Quietly with sly energy,
it circles a black hole
in this jungled universe.
feral mind feline creeping
pauses in pursuit, too ready
to nap another day away.
Oh this mind like the attic, bearer
of all rejects: artwork, furniture,
broken toys, cobwebs, dust motes
claim stale air.
Emotion is turned off, more a leaky pipe
for some replacement part
now on backorder, while the mind
Remains confused, eschews
uncorked sadness, challenges
action, the what if and what is
as it appears in the present.
The cat’s tail like an antenna picks up
a mouse dead behind the old
sewing machine table, stalks its remains
Through a packed jungle of unwanted
leftovers; none show rhyme nor reason.
Could that mind, more likely instinct
Than feelings lie among that pile
of castoffs already in play
between two large cat paws?
by Lee Landau
This poet writes with raw honesty about family events, those dysfunctional backstories. She shelters emotion from the snowy winters of Minnesota that spark her imagination. She writes about obsessions, both large and small that tumble through her poems. Publications include BlueStockings Magazine at Brown University, Wisconsin Review, Breath and Shadow, Avalon Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Ice Box Journal, Rockhurst Review, Vending Machine Press, The Monarch Review, Else Where Lit.
January 2016 | poetry
Moon jelly in the sea noodle
Shimmer of flying fish morning
Laughs to itself the sky has landed
Along the beach water dripping off its hair
Sometimes the world might
Come in a little ahead of the game
Today it looks like it was going to rain
Airwaves change a seagull into a musket ball
The lovely girl I’m too old & fat for
Sets her halo down
Next to her umbrella
It must get mighty rainy in heaven
& there’s still a star in the sky
A little pinkish around the edges
Gotta change this reality
Hold onto life by its tables & chairs
Typhoon voices too loud to be heard
Words bouncing around in the back of my mind
Rainfall rattles the windowshades
The wind seems laboring
Up a long flight of stairs
A car horn honks my name
The cannonade of an endless heart
A new window has opened
Spider webs are forming
The ceiling is falling
The Eiffel tower in miniature
Infrared balloon bubbling
Between the starfish high
In the mountains
& what only time will tell
The world loves itself in a special way
A man doesn’t have to worry about
The sunlight on how it is. The shadow
Of the door swung its shadow. She kind of
Knew something was going to happen
It was a ruby chandelier shot thru a wineglass
Falling back into empty spaces
Handwriting too indecipherable
To remain undecoded
A book too complicated
To remain unfinished
Bricks ripped away
In the underground restaurant
To make it seem more rustic
There is a solidity
Even in dreams
With its last breath the mountain
Yodels down the ravine
Nothing but rock formations
Shaped like cathedral spires.
by Kurt Cline
Kurt Cline is Associate Professor of English and World Comparative Literature, National Taipei University of Technology. His full-length book of poetry, Voyage the Sun, was published by Boston Poet Press in 2008. Poems and stories have appeared, most recently, in BlazeVOX, Danse Macabre, Shotglass Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, HuesoLoco, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Black Scat, and Clockwise Cat. Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness; Concentric, Beatdom Literary Journal; and Comparative Civilizations and Cultures.
